The Bird Genoscape Project grew out of many years of research on avian migration and connectivity of North American birds. In the early 1990’s, co-director Tom Smith and his graduate students began collecting feathers from banding stations in an effort to use molecular genetic markers to characterize migratory patterns of birds. He founded the Center for Tropical Research (CTR) at San Francisco State University in 1997, later moving CTR in 2002 to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) so it could integrate into the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. CTR collaborates with many partners, including the Institute for Bird Populations (IBP), and volunteers at more than 400 bird banding stations across North America. CTR’s Neotropical feather collection now houses feather samples from over 200,000 individual birds from across the North, Central, and South America.

In 2009, with advances in genomics, Kristen Ruegg and Tom Smith created the Bird Genoscape Project with the goal of developing connectivity maps of at least 100 species of North American migratory birds!